Inspiration Forum

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 28

10:00–⁠11:30 AM
Radical Lenses*
The inner world of Libuše Jarcovjáková

The seemingly smooth and machine-like function of society has also a different side to it: a number of unfitting, defiant and non-conforming persons, places, phenomena, feelings and moments. Perhaps they provide a mirror that tells us what our society is really like and what we ourselves are like. Across the decades, a very different history emerges than the one we know. Ten times about places, people and events in front of and behind the lens of Libuše Jarcovjáková’s camera.

Guest: Libuše Jarcovjáková

*Czech language only

12:00–⁠1:30 PM
Equality in Art
Panel discussion on the situation of Romani artists

The Romani minority is definitely one of the groups that don’t have equal opportunities on the labour market. This is no different in the field of arts and culture. An illustrative example is dramatic art where Romani people play mostly Romani characters portrayed in line with traditional stereotypes. What can be done to improve the situation of Romani artists?

Guests: Alžběta Ferencová, Vera Lacková, Vojta Lavička, Kamila Zlatušková
Moderated by: Alica Heráková

2:30–⁠4:00 PM
Czech Poverty
Panel discussion on the current burning topic

The recent Czech election campaign surprisingly little emphasised the problems of poverty, including underlying poverty, while equally neglecting social inequalities. It would seem that the Czech Republic has already overcome these negative phenomena. But what does research and real people’s stories tell us about the reality and how has the issue evolved over the last few years? Our discussion will explore how this situation affects single mothers and people burdened by debt and foreclosures, whether and how taxes can serve as the remedy, and what can be done to deal with the housing crisis.

Guests: Lucie Trlifajová, Saša Uhlová
Moderated by: Helena Truchlá

5:00–⁠6:15 PM
Trouble with Gender, Care and Violence
Keynote speech by Judith Butler and a conversation on the burning topics of recent years

The program will be broadcasted live from the Inspiration Forum stage.

Our reflections on the future will probably forever include the issue of the climate crisis, discrimination or economic inequalities. The linking element between these may be the care we commonly associate with the home, the family or services for the elderly or people with disabilities. Care will solve neither climate crisis nor economic inequalities, but in the world of increasingly more apparent individualised social risks and challenges, wider mutual care may underpin a paradigm shift that will make our life more bearable. This will mean taking more seriously the striking interconnectedness of people and building care infrastructures that will globally provide a substantial value.

Guest: Judith Butler*
Moderated by: Tereza Matějčková

*Judith Butler will join us live from the United States.

7:00–⁠8:30 PM
The Doughnut Economics in Practice
Keynote speech by Carlota Sanz Ruiz and discussion on the promising economic model

In Czechia, the doughnut associates buying of votes during one of the previous election campaigns. In economic theory, however, it represents a model of coping with the engrained idea of endless economic growth. This popular pastry combines the demand for social justice and the fulfilment of everyone's basic leeds into one system, of course, within the limits of our planet. The concept has gained worldwide fame, is being put into practice in major European cities such as Amsterdam and Barcelona, has been discussed at the United Nations and will be the focus of our guests at the Inspiration Forum in Jihlava.

Keynote speech: Carlota Sanz Ruiz*
Guests: Karolína Koubová, Tadeáš Žďárský
Moderated by: Jan Bittner

*Carlota Sanz Ruiz will join us live from London.

9:00–⁠10:30 PM
Citizen – Enemy to the State
Interview on the situation in Poland

Poland is an example of how quickly and effectively democratic institutions and freedoms can be curtailed. The ban on abortions and state interference in women's privacy has caused intense civil unrest throughout the country. A powerful civic movement has formed, raising the question – whether and with what tools can a liberal order be restored in the state to promote the rights and freedoms of the widest range of citizens?

Guest: Marta Lempart
Moderated by: Katarzyna Byrtek

GUESTS

Jan Bittner (Czech Republic)

Economist working at the Faculty of Business and Economics, University of Economics in Prague. He studied economic policy at the Faculty of Economics and Administration of Masaryk University Later, he worked as an economic analyst and subsequently also as an advisor to Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka. He is currently balancing his work as an economic analyst at the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs of the Czech Republic with his role as a caring father. As a member of the cooperative publishing house IDEA, he contributed to the publication of the Czech translation of Kate Raworth's The Doughnut Economics. He is a member of the Platform for a Decent Minimum Wage.

Judith Butler (USA)

Philosopher, gender theorist and Maxine Elliot Professor Emer. in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. They are best known for their 1990 book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Their theories of the performative nature of gender and sex were highly influential within feminist and queer theory. They are active in several human rights organizations and presently serve on the advisory board of Jewish Voice for Peace. They were the recipient of the Andrew Mellon Award for Distinguished Academic Achievement in the Humanities (2009-13), was elected as a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy in 2018, and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019. In 2020, they served as President of the Modern Language Association. In their last book The Force of Nonviolence they show how an ethic of nonviolence must be connected to a broader political struggle for social equality.\

Katarzyna Byrtek (Poland)

Freshly appointed editor-in-chief of Heroine.pl, she previously worked as a translator and author of tourist guides. She is one of the founders of the activist collective Ciocia Czesia.

Alžběta Ferencová (Czech Republic)

Singer, dancer, actress, presenter and finalist of the Slovak Miss Universe contest also known as Zea. She comes from Prešov and in 2019, she participated in the Czechia Slovakia's Got Talent competition with band For Someone. A major shift for her life and career came when a beauty contest agent approached her on the street. Her participation in Miss Universe opened the door for her to acting. She played in Slovak soap operas and commercials. Thanks to one of her soap opera roles, she got into singing. She has currently released her first LP, Burning Light, co-produced with Milan André. She produces alternative pop music and her inspiration includes FKA Twigs and Jessie Ware.

Alica Heráková (Czech Republic)

She is a journalist, activist, moderator and since 2018 a member of the Government Council for Roma Minority Affairs. In 2018, she started the Tuke.TV project, a non-commercial and independent video production based on a platform comprising Romani, Czech and Slovak professionals from the audiovisual and media field. She is the co-author of a publication of the Amendar Museum of Romani Culture that lists bios of 254 selected Romani figures living in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries whose life was connected with the Czech lands.

Libuše Jarcovjáková (Czech Republic)

Photographer and educator. Graduated from FAMU. For many years, she was documenting the Roma and Vietnamese community in Czechoslovakia and since 1983 also the visitors of the Prague T-Club, one of the two gay and lesbian bars in Prague at that time. A significant part of her work consists of self-portraits. In 1985, thanks to a fake marriage, she moved to West Berlin, and upon her return in 1992 she began teaching photography at the Secondary Industrial School of Graphic Arts in Hellichova Street in Prague, where she worked until recently. Her award-winning monograph Černé roky was published in 2017 and in 2019 she published a selection of photographs from the years 1970 – 1989 in a book called Evokativ. The accompanying exhibition of the same name at the 2019 Les Rencontres d'Arles festival was named the best exhibition of the year by The Guardian in its annual summary. Evokativ also won the title of the 2019 Photographic Publication of the Year awarded by the Association of Czech Photographers and Jarcovjáková became the 2019 Personality of Czech Photography. She is currently planning to publish a book of photographs from the T-Club and a publication about Berlin.

Karolína Koubová (Czech Republic)

Mayor of Jihlava. She graduated in Theatre Management at the Janáček Academy of Music and Performing Arts Brno (JAMU). She systematically honed her management skills in subsequent training programmes. She also gained foreign experience by studying in Finland at Mikkeli University of Applied Sciences, majoring in Business Management. Since 2009, she has dedicated herself to the DIOD theatre space, for which she prepared the production plan and which she has managed and successfully developed since its opening in 2011. Since 2014, she has been gaining political experience and she was successful with the Forum Jihlava initiative in local elections. Since 2018, she has been the Mayor of Jihlava.

Vera Lacková (Slovakia)

Filmmaker and owner of the production company Media Voice. Her work helps uproot stereotypical perceptions and discrimination against minorities. In addition to her commercial work, she has also participated in the international documentary project with her film Because There is A Hope and made short documentary Alica. She is one of the few established Romani filmmakers on the Czech media scene. How I Became a Partisan is her feature documentary debut. In 2019 she participated in the IDFA Academy in Amsterdam.

Vojta Lavička (Czech Republic)

Musician, activist and journalist. A trailblazer of Romani TV and radio broadcasting, who advocates for Romani rights, and as a great violinist became famous primarily thanks to his engagement in the band Gipsy.cz. Director Helena Třeštíková made a documentary about him called Vojta Lavička: Up and Down in 2013.

Marta Lempart (Poland)

Polish women’s rights activist. In 2016, she was involved in the creation of the National Women’s Strike (Ogólnopolski Strajk Kobiet) movement, which became one of the main actors in the Polish anti-government protests that erupted in October 2020 following the Constitutional Court’s decision on the abortion law. Among other things, the movement seeks greater rights for women and LGBT+ people, independence of the courts, freedom of speech and assembly, and access to better healthcare.

Tereza Matějčková (Czech Republic)

Philosopher and university lecturer. She teaches at the Institute of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Charles University, where she is an assistant professor. She focuses mainly on classical German philosophy and philosophy of religion. Since 2016, she has been a member of the editorial board of the Philosophical Journal, and she has also worked at the publishing house OIKOYMENH. In 2018, she published a revised version of her dissertation thesis dedicated to the leading figure of German idealist philosophy called Hegel's Phenomenology of the World. She has translated several publications, most recently Ken Krimstein's comic biography The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt.

Carlota Sanz Ruiz (Spain)

Regenerative economist, co-founder of Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL), DEAL’s Strategic Lead and activist. Her work focuses on enabling the concepts of Doughnut Economics to be turned into transformative practice, while ensuring they spread wide and with integrity. Carlota studied Business and Economics at Carlos III University in Madrid and grass-roots business transformation and narratives from the new economies, at Schumacher College. Prior to co-founding DEAL with Kate Raworth, Carlota worked for a decade in the financial sector in Spain and the UK and was the co-director of Economy for the Common Good in the UK – an international social movement promoting new economics.

Lucie Trlifajová (Czech Republic)

Social anthropologist. She works at the Centre for Social Issues and at the Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences in the Department of Socioeconomics of Housing. She has long been focusing on various forms of poverty, migration, economic insecurity and their impact on Czech society.

Helena Truchlá (Czech Republic)

Czech journalist. Since 2018, she has been an editor of the Foreign Affairs section of Aktuálně.cz online daily. She focuses on European affairs and events in Germany. She writes about the outlooks of Czech and European energy management and environmental issues, and also writes texts about Western Balkan countries. Previously, she contributed to Hospodářské noviny daily and selected German media. She studied Economics and Political Science in Brno, Berlin, Bordeaux and Edinburgh. She is a contributor to Aktuálně.cz's Chudé Česko 2021 project, a series of reports, interviews and analyses focusing on social inequality and hidden poverty.

Saša Uhlová (Czech Republic)

Czech journalist and graduate of Romani Studies at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague. She is an editor of the Alarm online daily and previously worked as an editor of the Deník Referendum online daily. She is also a field researcher and teacher. Her texts focus on social issues and working conditions.

Kamila Zlatušková (Czech Republic)

Czech producer, screenwriter, script editor, director and Head of the Serial Killer festival. Forbes magazine ranked her among the 150 most influential women in the Czech Republic. She founded and runs the international Serial Killer festival. She graduated in dramaturgy and screenwriting at the Janáček Academy of Music and Performing Arts Brno (JAMU) and in journalism at Masaryk University. In addition, she completed a one-year university internship in TV Broadcasting and Film Studies in the USA. She is also a lecturer at the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (FAMU), where she previously held the position of Vice Dean. She worked as a script editor and later as a creative producer at Czech Television, namely on three parts of the TV documentary series Little Birds (2010, 2014, 2020) and on other internationally acclaimed television programmes.

Tadeáš Žďárský (Czech Republic)

Student of Environmental Studies at the Faculty of Social Studies of Masaryk University. He works in the non-profit organization NaZemi, where he promotes the concept of so-called non-growth - he lectures, conducts workshops, writes articles and also initiated the establishment of a Czech non-growth working group. In addition, he is also an educator and methodologist. He focuses mainly on climate education or the Futuropolis: School of Emancipation project, the aim of which is to bring critical pedagogy to the Czech public space.

FILM SELECTION

Images can speak louder than words. Check out our selection of films from the Ji.hlava IDFF’s festival programme.

AL AMARI, TEMPORARY RESIDENCE (Czech Republic, Romania, Palestine, 2021, Kristýna Kopřivová)
BLESS YOU! (Poland, Russia, 2020, Maciek Hamela)
LETTER TO NIKOLA (Belgium, 2021, Hara Kaminara)
ONE-ROOM SCHOOL (Czech Republic, 2021, Petr Hátle)
WHEN YOU ARE CLOSE TO ME (Italy, 2021, Laura Viezzoli)
HEALING ME (Czech Republic, 2021, Tereza Tara)
RETURNING TO REIMS (France, 2021, Jean-Gabriel Périot)
HEAVEN (Czech Republic, 2021, Tomáš Etzler)
LEAVING BEGINNINGS BEHIND (Czech Republic, 2021, Linda Kallistová Jablonská)
YOON (Portugal, 2021, Pedro Figueiredo Neto, Ricardo Falcão)

READING LIST

If you want to delve deeper into the topic, here is a selection of the most interesting texts and other resources recommended by the programme guests, which are definitely worth the read!

POLAND SMITTEN BY PROTESTS THAT SCARED THE GOVERNMENT. "YOUR TIME IS OVER," SHOUT POLISH WOMEN (VOXPOT)
In the autumn of 2020, the biggest demonstrations in decades swept across Poland in response to a ruling by Poland's Constitutional Court, which, staffed by judges loyal to the ruling party, ruled that almost all abortions – including those where the fetus is seriously damaged – are unconstitutional. Voxpot's report takes a look at what happened during the anti-state protests right on the streets of Warsaw.

CHUDÉ ČESKO (AKTUÁLNĚ.CZ)
The online daily Aktuálně.cz has long focused on underlying poverty and unresolved systemic problems that contribute to social inequalities in society. This year's series of reports, interviews and analyses looks at whether the Czech Republic is taking steps to reduce poverty and shows how the pandemic has affected various professions.

AMSTERDAM IS EMBRACING A RADICAL NEW ECONOMIC THEORY TO HELP SAVE THE ENVIRONMENT. COULD IT ALSO REPLACE CAPITALISM? (TIME)
The doughnut economy, a model proposed by economist Kate Raworth, represents a way of economic thinking with environmental and social sustainability at its core. This alternative to the growth-at-all-costs ideology makes it possible to imagine an economy that gives all people a decent life while respecting the limits of our planet. Amsterdam is one of the cities that is trying to put this theoretical model that challenges the principles of the current economic system – capitalism - into practice and can also be geographically its birth place. The implementation of the model in Amsterdam takes place in collaboration with Doughnut Economy Action Lab, led by IF guest Carlota Sanz Ruiz. You can read about the steps the city has taken and how it can become an inspiration for other cities.

IN OUR TIME (BBC 4)
Tereza Matějčková: “Besides reading scholarly texts from a variety of sources, I try to keep track of people who are capable of presenting human sciences outside of the academic world. The best examples are the programmes In Our Time or Sternstunden der Philosophie.